Ambimat designs embedded products that talk over long-range, low-power wireless. LoRa, LoRaWAN and Sigfox are the non-cellular side of that work: radios that reach across a campus or a city on a battery that has to last, carrying small amounts of data from a lot of places.
Ambimat is a design house, not a network operator. What we build is the device end — the hardware, the firmware, the antenna and power budget, and the path from the node to whatever collects the data. Which network the deployment then rides on is part of the design conversation, not something we sell.
Where LPWAN is the right answer
Low-power wide-area networking earns its place when the data is small, the reporting interval is long and the node has to survive on its own power for a long time. That describes a lot of infrastructure and very little consumer electronics.
- Remote sensing and telemetry, where a reading matters more than a stream
- Metering and utility endpoints spread across a service area
- City-wide infrastructure — street lighting, environmental and civic sensing
- Distributed monitoring where running cable or holding a cellular session is not viable
- Battery-powered nodes that must not be visited for maintenance
Ambimat has written about how this family of technologies divides up, in What is LPWAN and types of LPWAN networks and Non-cellular network based wide area networks. The short version: the cellular LPWANs (NB-IoT, LTE-M / CAT-M1) and the non-cellular ones (LoRa and LoRaWAN, Sigfox) solve the same shape of problem with very different trade-offs in coverage, cost per node and who owns the network.
LoRa and LoRaWAN engineering
On the device side the work is radio module selection and integration, the antenna and its ground plane, the power budget that decides whether the claimed battery life is real, and firmware that behaves when the link is poor rather than when it is ideal. Above that sits the join procedure, the uplink and downlink pattern, and how the node degrades when a gateway is unreachable.
Beyond the radio the device is still a product: sensors and their conditioning, enclosure and mounting, field provisioning, and the route from gateway to whatever back-end the operator already runs. Ambimat’s involvement typically covers the whole of that, from architecture through to PCB release and board bring-up.
Sigfox, and how it differs
Sigfox is worth separating from LoRa rather than lumping in with it. It is an ultra-narrowband technology built around a network operated by Sigfox and its partners, aimed at very low device cost, very long battery life and predominantly uplink traffic — a device that reports and rarely listens. LoRa, by contrast, is a modulation Ambimat can build with in a privately operated LoRaWAN deployment as well as a public one.
That difference decides the architecture early: with Sigfox the network is a given and the design is constrained to fit it, whereas a LoRaWAN deployment puts gateway placement, network server and key management inside the project’s scope.
Security is part of the design, not an afterthought
LoRa is one of the main components of Ambimat’s security work, because it is so widely used for city-wide infrastructure — and the security of LoRa edge nodes and gateways is a point most city-infrastructure programmes miss. The LoRaWAN specification itself was designed with security as an essential aspect and defines end-to-end encryption with separate network and application layer keys, but a specification only protects a deployment if the keys are provisioned, stored and rotated properly on real hardware.
That is where this work meets Ambimat’s security practice. See AmbiSecure for hardware-rooted identity and key protection, and Securing smart city infrastructure for a fuller discussion of LoRaWAN key handling and the threats a city-scale deployment faces.
Related Ambimat work
- Design by Technology — the full range of connectivity Ambimat designs with
- Zigbee and mesh networks — the short-range, many-node counterpart to LPWAN
- Machine to Machine — the cellular side, including NB-IoT and CAT-M1
- The transformation of city street lighting